first, the good news.

They let people back into Los Alamos! Which means, on the one hand, a town full of smoke, but on the other, a town that's out of danger. Sadly, the fire has now moved north, towards Native American lands, and is now close to 150,000 acres. That's not small. So continue to keep my fellow New Mexicans in your thoughts.

Next, more good news: Mike and I survived our "gourmet hike." Might not sound so tough--or very surprising--to most people, but I will admit that there were moments when I felt like my survival was not at all guaranteed.  This may be due to the fact that I am extremely out of shape, but I maintain that the mountain had it out for me. Or at least for my poor Jello-like knees. At any rate, the premise of a gourmet hike is to hike up the side of a mountain, have an 8-course meal, spend the night in an Alpine hiking hut, then come back down the next day. Hike we did, and eat we did. And also spending the night, but that part's not terribly interesting, other than the fact that we thought we were going to be sleeping in the giant communal-mattress room, but ended up in a small 12-person room with our own bunk beds, pillows, and duvets. Duvets, people. That was LIVING. (Although if I'd known, I wouldn't have carried my sleeping bag, pointlessly, all the way up to the hut. Bygones.)

Anyway. The photos. Disclaimer: this post is very heavy on the photos. Sorry, and then deal with it. 

Grindelwald, southwest of Zurich, near Interlaken. Spent the night here before the hike. This is what we saw rolling into town: clouds on the mountains.

This is what we saw the next morning from the hostel window. Seriously. 

View from the trailhead. The pointy one on the right is the north face of the Eiger, which is, unbeknownst to me, very famous. (And also the source of the brand name, The North Face.)

Our first view of the glacier, complete with waterfall. Here's a nifty little map; we were between the Wetterhorn and the Schreckhorn. Grindelwald is in the valley behind/below us.

And then we turned the corner and this happened. Glacier on the saddle between the Wetterhorn and the Schreckhorn (the peak on the right).

And then you turn around and see your first view of the hut: it's that teeny tan speck on that rock outcrop. IT'S STILL SO FAR AWAY. And so far up.

Our fellow hikers from Zurich: Thomas, Rene, Aaron, and Nanda...just for scale.

There were wildflowers everywhere. Some overlaps with the Rocky Mountain wildflowers, but some I've never seen before. Neat.

A wild Edelweiss, which is supposedly fairly rare. We saw tons of them. I know this photo is out of focus, but I want you to see just how weird looking these things are. I think they are alien life forms. Everyone else seems to just love them.

The first thing we saw when we got to the hut: the "wine fridge." 

Aaron, Rene, and Mike, celebrating the hike. And the delicious barbecued lunch we were about to have.

View down the valley to Grindelwald from the hut's terrace.

The hut.

Wild Forget-Me-Nots. I LOVE THEM.

My friend the marmot.

Appetizers on the terrace: bubbly and various fancy breads with various fancy dips, oils, and spreads. YUM. This picture does the temperature no justice, however: it was SO VERY COLD and windy out there.

Alpine wildflowers on the dining tables.

So they have these mountain goat-y things called steinbocks, and the hut keepers salt the rocks and rock walls, and the goats come and lick at it for a while. These two were only momentarily diverted from salt licking by some sort of minor territorial dispute.

Goats. Licking salt. Their horns are NEAT.

More goats. I love the hushed, multi-lingual voices of our fellow hikers in the background.

So I've done for you the courtesy of not posting pictures of all of the dinner courses...just my favorites. This was no. 4: sturgeon with balsamic vinegar topping, on top of various legumes and pesto. So tasty.

They alternated where the courses were served, so we had to keep going back to the frigid outdoors. Which is why the photos of goats are interspersed. This one is goats. Licking salt. In the sunset.

Course no. 5: truffle gnocchi with foie gras. I could really have skipped the foie gras (I don't see what the big deal is!) in favor of a double helping of gnocchi. Yum.

Sunset from the terrace.

Maybe my favorite course: dessert. Flourless chocolate cake, chocolate-filled ravioli with cherry sauce, and a single liqueur-filled, chocolate-covered cherry. AMAZING.

The view behind the hut, up the Wetterhorn.

There was a second peak on the Schreckhorn, entirely unknown to us the first day 'cause of the cloud cover. Surprise!

Blue ice = fresh avalanches. This thing was dropping ice several times an hour. It sounded like thunder.

You can't quite get the scale of this place from any of my photos, but here's a view from the "trail" (sliver carved out of the rock, more like!) down to another section of the trail. The tiny colored dots are actual people. It was a steep drop, friends.

These amazing pink-flowered shrubby things were everywhere. 

There was a waterfall over the trail: here's Mike crossing under it.

I loved these weird little purple flowers.

And this weird little flower. Which I saw at the Botanic Gardens the other day, as well. 

Will we go back next year? I don't know. It was a pretty neat experience, having fancy food in a very non-fancy, unlikely, and extremely beautiful place...but it was also a pretty tough (ok, so only about a 3.5-hour) slog, and fairly miserable for me because of my stupid, defective knees, and inability to sleep in any bed other than my own. Mike is sold, but I'm not quite. The good news is that I have a whole year to think about it. And maybe even train a little for it. ;)

What I'm reading: I've finished The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, by Robert M. Edsel, as well as A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, another Bill Bryson book. The Monuments Men was truly an interesting, appalling, and heroic story, but I have to confess that in some points, the story was overshadowed by the author's tendency to be redundant (hint: skip the introduction--he'll repeat most of it word-for-word throughout the rest of the book) and to be a gushing, unabashed admirer of his subjects (the Monuments Men, I mean...). There are some really interesting characters, though, and the story itself is truly interesting. A Walk in the Woods was, as are most of Bryson's books, interesting and entertaining, but overall, a little bit dark and slightly depressing. Not nearly as gleeful as In a Sunburned Country (which remains my favorite of his books), this one dealt with attempting to walk the entire trail, as well as tidbits about its history, with a little natural history thrown in. I'm now into Lost in Shangri-La, another nonfiction (I'm hooked!! you just cannot find fiction that's as good as nonfiction!) about the story of a handful of people who survived a plane crash in the super-isolated mountains of New Guinea in 1945. So far, it's extremely tragic, but tremendously fascinating. 

Next up: a brief jaunt into Bavaria...a quick trip to Augsburg, Germany.

not again.

Pray for my hometown, people. It is currently beset by yet another giant, raging, terrifying wildfire that covered the same amount of ground in a single night as it took the last giant, raging fire to cover in a week. And that last fire--back in 2000--left 400+ families homeless. Thank the good Lord that nobody died. Forgive the terrible grammar, but those are the facts, kids, and now it seems to be happening all over again, starting with city-wide evacuations and ending who knows where. This is the town in which both I and my husband grew up, and in which my parents, one sister, my father-in-law and his family all live, and the town to which my other sister and her husband are (...were...?) planning on moving. Our roots run deep: I still call it "home" whenever we talk about visiting. The world community and media seems more concerned about the fire reaching radioactive waste--hey! now's the classiest time to take pot shots at the lab! at the (supposedly) unprepared firefighters! at nuclear research! at whatever about Los Alamos you don't like!--and I know how important it is to prevent that, but all I can think about is the fact that people may lose their homes, animals, livelihoods again. It might even be scarier for me, here, helpless, than for my family, there, watching and waiting to see when it might be their turn to leave town. Oddly enough, they don't seem terribly worried, but I guess that's because they've done this before. (It's truly no wonder the first wave of evacuations was so "orderly".)

This may be the most inappropriate time for a fire-related joke, and so you're all lucky that I can't access from Switzerland the NBC website to pull up old SNL videos...otherwise, I'd quote for you one of the gems from an episode in 2009, wherein Darrell Hammond-as-the-Governator was talking about trying to sell some of California's wildfires to the highest bidder in order to right the state's economy. When all I can do is worry and watch the news updates obsessively, at least there's still stupid humor to fall back on. Seems to me that Los Alamos (well, and the greater Southwest, at this point) would be set if they could just sell off some of these fires...and maybe the strong winds...and also the prolonged drought... Inappropriate, maybe, but it's fairly poignant for me.

Please keep my weird, isolated, but utterly beloved hometown, my family, and our friends there, in your thoughts.

cheddar: the finest of all cheeses.

Ok, so it's probably not, but it is SO nice to get a fix every now and then. I finally found a store near our house that carries this amazing white cheddar that our friend Jen introduced us to, HOORAY! And now we're having it on Mexican food for dinner. Yessssss. (FYI, the Swiss and French--and, I'm sure, to some extent, the rest of Europe--look down all their respective noses at our humble American cheddar...they think it's pedestrian, at best. So finding a good cheddar here is fairly exciting, and fairly rare!)

In other news, Tuesday our 8th anniversary, so Mike and I went out to dinner at this small-ish Asian place called Anthony's Kitchen. Their menu--and gimmick--is fairly simple: you either choose the multi-course surprise menu; you select your meat and they surprise you with appetizers and desserts; or you just order the meat. Naturally, we went for the all-surprise menu, and BOY was it tasty. Maybe not the fanciest food we've ever had, but quite solidly good, and the waitress was absolutely delightful (and English-speaking, wooo!). The first starter was a papaya salad with tomatoes, onions, and some sort of fishy flavor; next came the fantastic spring rolls with three sauces and candied ginger; then the dim sum dumplings (chicken, pork, and shrimp); then the fish dish (no idea what fish it was, but it was nice and white and well cooked and floating in this delicious broth with onions and carrots); then the meat dish (cubed beef in a tamarind sauce); and, finally, dessert: fresh diced mangoes in mango sorbet. YUM. Here are the two photos I actually remembered to take.

DIM SUM!! 

Fish dish. Fish dish. Fish dish.

In conclusion, a lovel dinner on a lovely little outdoor patio with a lovely waitress. A nice anniversary, indeed.  :)

Next up: Germany! Freiburg, to be exact. A little off the beaten path, to be sure, but quite charming. We made another one of our lightning-fast, overnight trips to a town not so far away, but this time on the bike. Wooo! I am so glad we bought that thing: it opens up all kinds of travel possibilities for us, not the least of which is being able to avoid the tourist hordes in places that are more accessible by mass transit. But I digress. Freiburg. A nifty little college town, right on the edge of the Black Forest, supposedly the most environmentally friendly town in Germany, with an OLD cathedral (dating back to the 1200s, probably). We meandered around the city, had a hearty south German meal (fresh local fish, Black Forest ham with apples, really good grainy bread, pork chops with black pepper gravy) at some cute little restaurant off of a street garlanded with wisteria, and had a generally relaxed and interesting time.

A neat feature of Freiburg: lots of the main pedestrian streets have these little man-made canals? brooks? running through them. Very cool.

Giant sandstone cathedral. Naturally, the spire was under construction when we visited.

Square around the cathedral.

If I'm not mistaken, this inscription dates to 1295. Seriously. The date is the only part I can read.

The entrance to the cathedral--lots of carved statues and arches and doors and things.

They had some amazing stained-glass windows. Really beautiful.

I love gargoyles, and this place had some doozies. (I chose not to post the slightly more lewd ones...)

One of the big tower-gates, under which the city's trams drive. (A few cars, too.)

I love these iron signs...they seem to be all over Switzerland and Germany. (I'm sure they're elsewhere, too...I JUST HAVEN'T BEEN THERE YET.)

You, too, can venture all the way to Germany to buy Native American jewelry. Awesome.

This building was some sort of cloisters, and then the seat of the Archdiocese. And it was all carve-y.

And it had these amazing green doors...

...with these doorknockers. I want them for my house in Denver.

The pedestrian streets also had these cool pebbly inlays: most were just random patterns, but here, a pretzel.

And beer. It is Germany, after all.

Pretty building. There were a handful of these painted ones scattered around, and they were ALL beautiful.

A sign that makes Mike truly happy. I just like the illustration at the bottom.

In the beer garden. It was quite lovely.

The other big tower-gate. The Golden Arches are sadly ubiquitous in Europe. (Why couldn't we have exported the good fast food, like Taco Bell or Wendy's? Or even Arby's? Good Times? Sonic, for crying out loud!)

Pretty river running through.

This mural wraps around the building corner. I thought it was pretty hilarious.

How European is this? They have a castle on their sewer covers.

If your'e going to have bars on your windows, this is the way to go.

Two cappuccinos, two delicious and fresh sandwiches, and one slice of Black Forest cake, all for the bargain price of 11 Euros. It's true: everywhere is cheaper than Zurich.

Just...pretty.

I liked this town. Plus, it was full of really interesting jewelry stores that were all closed for a holiday, so we may have to go back... and also maybe to eat more of that cake. :)